Posted
by
Cliff
on Friday November 24, 2006 @07:20PM
from the a-change-in-UI dept.

Sagefire asks: "Aqua is a beautiful interface but it can be incredibly resource intensive (especially for older/low-end machines). And, though the open source community has made great strides in reverse engineering proprietary drivers from Mac OS X, I would love to be able to simply keep using the drivers that came with it, for now. Since there is a fully functional BSD variant under the hood, is it possible (using X11.app, darwinports, and/or Fink) to boot to a command line and simply startx? Would it use less RAM to bypass Aqua?"

But even without running Aqua OS X is extremely resource-hungry. Test it yourself by logging in as username ">console" (without the quotes) for a command prompt and you'll see what I mean. Wish I had better news...

That's because Mach spends a shit of of resources passing messages and servicing real-time interrupts. That has nothing to do with the difference between X11 vs. Aqua in terms of resource consumption. Stick Yellow Dog or NetBSD on that old G3 if you want performance.

Not quite. The best way to test this is if you enter the command-line directly by either going into single-user mode or editing the/etc/ttys since these methods don't load Aqua at all. If you use the >console method, I don't think the system unloads Aqua from memory.

Is X11 really that much better than Aqua? I don't think so. Remember, Aqua has been optimized for Mac hardware. X11 (unless you've compiled it yourself) probably hasn't been optimized to as great of an extent. You can try switching, but I don't think you'll se much of an improvement with X11 vs. Aqua.

What are you smoking? DPS (and the more recent OS X variant DPDF) goes back to 1988, with the introduction of NeXTSTep on the NeXT cube [wikipedia.org]. Mac OS X is really just NeXTStep. Aqua, however, is an Apple addition and - IMO - is a real improvement. But it's also a resource hog.

True to a point but I do have some old hardware around and I used to have WAYmore patience back in the day; "fast" response then isn't even slow response now.

In particular I remember sitting at a NeXT cube and going "WOW! This will beGREAT! as soon as they speed it up to something useable!"...but, like the Macbefore it, those speedups were a looooooong time coming. Even at the time theNeXT was slow at its introduction (in part beca

> Aqua has been optimized for Mac hardware. X11 (unless you've compiled it yourself) probably hasn't been optimized to as great of an extent.

Thats bullshit.

How do you think you can "optimize" some widget library for the hardware? You either have drivers for the graphic card running or you dont. Just recompiling some text editor doesnt "glue" it more to the underlying hardware. Or, by going with your logic, why couldnt someone just offer an "optimized" version of X for the Mac hardware in the first place?

New CPUs have new assembler op codes available, and ever since MMX, SIMD (useful for graphics-related processing for one) has been enhanced with each new CPU. Programs that can use SSE, for example, can take advantage of native op codes for SIMD rather than emulating it with a lot more code.

Well, actually, that would be rather wrong. One of the innovations of OS X's GUI is closer tie-ins with the rendering hardware; the GUI really does make more direct use of the GPU than a typical X11 interface does. The X11 interface is written in very generic terms to make rendering calls which are then handled in an optimized way... But it's still a bunch of separate rendering calls. Aqua knows quite a bit about what GPU features are necessarily available to it, and tweaks the GPU directly.On the other

Yes, there are already comments along the lines of "why use OS X if you're not going to use Aqua?"; that's basically what it amounts to. You get few, if any, benefits from ditching Aqua if you're still running OS X - the only thing that you get from it is the drivers that came with the system in the first place, and if that's all you want, you can always run Darwin instead and copy in the necessary kexts for the hardware that doesn't already have drivers with it, especially since, under the hood, Darwin and OS X are the same, except that Darwin comes configured to run primarily as a *nix-type command-line based system instead of as a desktop with a nice GUI.

Could it be done? Yes, but it would probably take a larger investment of time to figure out how to remove or disable the stuff you don't want than it would be to start from a system that comes ready to run the way you want it anyway.

You get few, if any, benefits from ditching Aqua if you're still running OS X

There may be benefits. OS X is extremely resource intensive and has terrible memory management. A fine place to start if you're interested in a performant machine would be to strip back Aqua.

I work with 3D alot and have been surprised by just how much of an under-acheiver OS X is (Core Duo or PPC) compared to a Linux install on the same machine. OS X won't ever compete with Linux in 3D workstation market until it makes it eas

But you're better off using something else (eg some Linux variant, BSD, etc.)

However, if you really want to try, do the following:

1) open/etc/ttys. The first two lines that begin with "console" has one which is commented out. Uncomment that one and comment out the second one. Now the next time you reboot, you'll enter the console directly

2) Install XDarwin [xdarwin.org], which can be started from the command-line as opposed to the X that Apple provides which can only be started alongside Aqua.

For anyone wanting to try this out, it's unnecessary to fiddle with the ttys file. You simply log into the system as ">console" without the quotes into the username, and no password. This will exit Aqua and dump you back to a text based console, allowing you to log in and startx.

Since there is a fully functional BSD variant under the hood, is it possible (using X11.app, darwinports, and/or Fink) to boot to a command line and simply startx? Would it use less RAM to bypass Aqua?"

Yes, it's possible. At least, it was a few years ago, when I first installed KDE via fink then logged in at the login prompt as user ">console" (with no password) and performed a startx. I didn't use it for a terribly long time as a KDE-only box, and it was more an experiment to see what was possible - but it worked just like any other KDE setup. I didn't use Apple's own X11, but had XDarwin installed instead.

A note too - Aqua is only the default theme with OSX, and just describes the look of the OSX GUI. Quartz is the engine underneath that performance depends on. There was no noticeable difference in speed with XDarwin over Quartz, but perhaps that could be improved with more work on XDarwin.

What for you would like to do it? Just for the sake of it? None of Apple/OSX strenghts would really show up in such setup:

1. Drivers - If you need, a decent BSD with X11 go use FreeBSD and craft yourself hardware that works with FreeBSD. It should not be hard to specify a set of fully working hardware with great drivers for FreeBSD. I think you have much more options with PC hardware and FreeBSD (working decently) than with OSX. Or maybe go Linux, not much different from BSD really.

2. Software - None of OSX software (such like Photoshop, Office etc.) will work under X11. And in fact it is less decently packaged X11 software than for FreeBSD or Linux.

3. Support, quality etc. - you won't get any of this from Apple in such setup. With FreeBSD or Linux you will get decent quality and community support because running kernel and userspace/X11 on top of it is what we do with Linux/FreeBSD.

So I don't really see benefits of such setup. Go get yourself decent PC or laptop with supported hardware. Install FreeBSD or Linux on it and you will have that what you are seeking in quite polished form.

Drivers - If you need, a decent BSD with X11 go use FreeBSD and craft yourself hardware that works with FreeBSD. It should not be hard to specify a set of fully working hardware with great drivers for FreeBSD. I think you have much more options with PC hardware and FreeBSD (working decently) than with OSX. Or maybe go Linux, not much different from BSD really.

I have never gotten 3d acceleration working in FreeBSD on PPC Macs. I do notice the difference in the desktop speed when I don't have them on X11.

An old g3 with a good Rage 128 might have enough horsepower to display an mpeg.

I think you mean that the old G3 might have enough horsepower to display an MPEG, or maybe not. I don't think you'd be using any special technology with the Rage.

I don't think ATI had on-chip MPEG decoding until Radeon. Even then, Apple's record for taking advantage of GPU accellerated MPEG decoding was spotty at times. My G4 mini didn't use its GPU MPEG decoder for DVD playback, it used more than half the CPU. This is compar

There are several Linux distros for Mac hardware, just install one of those. I'd give regular Ubuntu [ubuntulinux.org] a choice, and if that's too heavy-weight, try Xubuntu [xubuntu.org].

Ubuntu comes with a lot of software pre-installed, it feels a lot more responsive than OS X on the same hardware, and it has very much a Mac-like feel. I'm running it on an old iMac and have been quite happy with it.

What you're talking about doing practically speaking wouldn't allow you to run any of the GUI apps that come with OS X or those that are sold for it. If you take that away it's not really OS X. As some have already said, one wonders what the point of that is.There's no way of knowing what part of the system is the cause of your performance issues without profiling it. ( You could do a 'System Trace' with the latest version of Shark. )

Aqua is part of the Apple HIG. It defines what UI elements look like an

Why would you want to do this? Seriously. Why? You bought a mac, but you want to remove all the mac specific stuff from it. Why didn't you save you're money and just by a PC and install linux on it. If you're not using the mac apps, (and let's be honest, Darwin doesn't count. It's just another BSD clone, which is essentially just another unix.) then you bought the hardware to look cool. If you absolutely have to look cool, but not run any of the macosx apps, then just dual boot.

The whole point of a unix guy owning a mac is that it's unix in all the way he wants (command line, symlinks, standard unix tools) and none of the ways he doesn't (insmod, recompiliing kernels, fucking with wpasupplicant and buggy ass drivers). It Just Works(tm). You seem bent on ignoring THE advantage of the mac, and turning it into just another piece of commodity hardware, only at luxury prices. It's absolutely pointless.

The article wasn't about the new machines but the older ones. The new machines, even the cheapest ones sold new, run OS X exceedingly well, though it helps to have a good amount of memory. Given that memory is pretty cheap for the most part, I don't think that's really a problem.

Maybe because he likes the hardware? I know that's why I've been buying iBooks (unfortunately, they have been discontinued). Good battery life, easy to carry, well supported by Linux, and, as far as I can tell, pretty durable.

6-pin firewire? This is important for portable firewire drives, since the extra two pins provide power, and if it's a laptop we're talking about, you'd need a separate power supply to run the drive - very inconvenient at the best of times.

By "It just works", are you referring to hardware and drivers or software?If software, will it run without Aqua? I mean, can you get something like iTunes or GarageBand to run under X?

If hardware, well...you should have just run Linux. I mean, if you want "It just works" then just buy known-supported hardware. The reason "It just works" on Mac is because Apple controls the hardware. You won't have to fiddle with driver one if you do some homework on what is supported under Linux, first.

Aqua is quite customizeable, thanks to Objective-C and the Cocoa framework's highly dynamic runtime. Look up method swizzling and class posing and learn how to tweak every last aspect of your desktop. Mind-blowing stuff there.

It is possible to run an X server on Mac OS X that will display all of your X applications straight to your Aqua desktop. This way you can run Aqua and X11 applications side by side, and it is very easy to get it running. For more information:

I have OS X running on older G4 machines. I find the X11 performance on these machines, for instance OO.org, to as bad as the OS X performance, although the performance of most applications is good. Really, the only applications that are horrible are the iLife application, which run slow even on the high end G4 machines.

I will say this. Make sure that services that do not need to run, like the dock or Apache, are not running. If you want to run X11, things like emacs are great, if you get to know to use them. There is really no reason to not have most things running in X11, although I have gotten used to mail.app.

Of course, the big issue in these machines seems to be memory. *nix likes memory and always has. It has seldom been the OS for small footprints. Most G4 macs can accommodate at least 512 MB, and if you running a G3 mac, you likely have other difficulties.

``*nix likes memory and always has. It has seldom been the OS for small footprints.''Must be because it was originally written on a lowly, mostly abandoned PDP-7. Seriously, I'd argue that *nix systems are pretty light as operating systems go. Even today, you can get *nix systems to run in under a megabyte of memory (e.g. MINIX 2).

``Most G4 macs can accommodate at least 512 MB, and if you running a G3 mac, you likely have other difficulties.''

is if it's possible to run Aqua / Quartz apps rootless on an X11 desktop (exactly the opposite of what X11.app does). This way I can use xlogin, GNOME, etc. for the default desktop UI, but still be able to run Mac-specific programs.

It's not exactly what you asked, but I just wanted to point out that, if you run Linux on a PowerPC Mac, you can run OS X (and OS 9, and earlier) apps. Using Mac-on-Linux [maconlinux.org], you can boot other Power Mac operating systems in their own virtual machines.

I tried to use Aqua for a few years on my TiBook G4/800 DVI. It was nice and pretty/etc, but I could never get used to the GUI. All that 'single menu at the top of the screen', 'click to focus', and 'focused window has to be front window' crap they forced on me. Some of these things could be worked around with 3rd party hacks, but I never managed to fix all of them. IINM, MS Windows managed to allow all these things to be fixed, but "Apple knows better how I should work" - pah.So, I switched to ubuntu earli

Maybe with Ubuntu's default kernel, but my Gentoo PPC box has read/write HFS+ support just fine. I use it whenever I need to mount the Mac OS 9 partition to install a new kernel (it's an Old World PowerPC 603 machine, so the Linux kernel sits in the Mac OS 9 System Folder).

Regarding typing Chinese, I think it is partially what you're used to, as MS Window's default input methods all suck for me, and Apple's seem even worse. I use either SCIM or fcitx, what do you use?

SCIM's simple pinyin method is quite good. Of course, if you use traditional characters or aren't a Mandarin speaker or both, this might not be ideal. If you type Wubi, as I do, fcitx is a better option, and its pinyin mode is pretty usable, although not as good as SCIM's.

> Regarding typing Chinese, I think it is partially what you're used to, as MS Window's default input methods all suck for me, and Apple's seem even worse. I use either SCIM or fcitx, what do you use?

I don't use either (I don't know much Chinese). It's my wife (she's a native), and any of the other Chinese people who happen to want to borrow my computer for a moment. They're (of course) all used to using MS's input methods and are very frustrated by anything unfamiliar.

I guess it depends on your priorities, and I think you've exaggerated my complaints somewhat.

> Just to recap: you have no reliable WiFi

Wifi is reliable, just not with encryption (certain types; I forget which) - though I haven't really tried that hard to make it work. So, someone may have it working, I don't know. I hardly ever need encryption, but it would be nice to have it just for those occasions.

The biggest "casual" overhead of Aqua/Quartz on older machines is the "shadow" around windows. There's an application extension (APE//Haxie) called "shadowkiller" that removes the shadow and significantly improves response time on older Macs.

Nope, In my considered opinion, if a machine is too old to run OS X (so we're clearly talking Macs here, remember?) then linux is probably the best option, as it will have the best software support. BSDs are also an option, but again, the software support for PPC BSD isn't going to be as good as PPC linux.

Maybe you don't notice, but I do notice the difference in X when running in a non-accelerated desktop. The switching of applications is slower. I have more troubles playing movies that I could play originally in Mac OS X/Windows.

Nope, In my considered opinion, if a machine is too old to run OS X (so we're clearly talking Macs here, remember?) then linux

A few years ago I compared OS X 10.2 and KDE 3 (YDL) on a G3 All in One, with perhaps a Rage 128 or some other ATI GPU with 2 or 4 MB of VRAM.

With 256 and later 320MB RAM, KDE was much, much faster, by a long shot. It was a shock, since I'd long held the misconception that KDE/Gnome were slow (coming from the days of running Windows 95/NT vs. Gnome/KDE on old Pentiums with 64 MB of RAM).

OS X did not support that machine's video card for any sort of acceleration, and there was no way to turn down the needless eye candy to a level that made the OS usable.

KDE is slower when compaired to running a unencumbered fvwm2 desktop. Don't get me wrong, KDE and Gnome are very nice projects. They have done wonders to help the transition to linux from winblows. But there is just something to building a desktop from scratch and watching it run like a cat with a bottle rocket up its arse.

"ATY Mach64U Pro" is a Rage Pro, usually with 2MB of VRAM. Unless you specifically got the upgrade to 6MB, that is. My beige G3 tower has the same (with the upgrade). So does my old "Lombard" Powerbook G3 (1999/bronze keyboard), though it has the "LT" version (laptop? light? lame trash?) with 8MB VRAM built in.There was a Mac OS X driver included with 10.1 (I think) for the Rage Pro, but it was unsupported and had to be installed manually, and that was a massive PITA. I'm not talking about a manual install

The G3 AIO certainly is compatible with OS X.3 (and from what I've heard, X.4). I have one sitting right in front of me that proves it. It's not supported by Apple for running those versions, but that's a very different question. Apple doesn't support running PPC Linux or OpenDarwin on this machine either, but that doesn't make them incompatible with it.

You sound quite ignorant here. There are free (3d-accelerated) drivers for ATI cards called "ati". They work fine on PPC, and are fast enough to allow you to play ppracer (and friends).If 2d isn't working acceptably, then you simply misconfigured the X Server. This might have been a problem 20 or so years ago, but nowadays it's fine.

I recently switched my old Powerbook G4 from OS X 10.4 to Kubuntu/Dapper Drake, and I find it much more responsive and easier to use. All the nicities of the Powerbook still

I have to say I don't understand this comment. Not that there aren't plenty of good reasons to run Linux on your PB G4, but I don't get this.

There is no Apple Office-style product. iWork is designed and priced to cover a much more basic set of needs. While MS Office is made by Satan and can be absurdly expensive it is not a "cheap imitation" of KOffice or OOo -- they are imitating it, sometimes successfully, somet

Easier to use my ass. The reason I moved away from Linux is because it is -not- easier to use. For example, configuring the windowing environment in OS X? Nope, never have to. Installing an application? Drag the app bundle to the Applications folder. Installed. Uninstall an application? Drag app bundle to trash. No dependency hell whatsoever. No library conflicts. Absolutely incredible and easy. What to find an obscure or forgotten file or phrase of text within a file in an instant? Click Spotl

> just got sick of the constant bullshitting around to configure anything and the constant sub-par user interfaces. The people using Linux always downtalk and downplay OS's like OS X, but have nothing better to show for it, even after developing Linux for over 13 years now.

Hmm, I got sick of bullshitting around to configure anything in OS X. Want a recent emacs? Compile it from CVS yourself. Want a sane user interface on cp/mv/etc.? Download GNU coreutils/textutils/findutils from fink/portage/ports/f

What's wrong with AquaEmacs?
And if you get some water up into that crack, you might just get the sand out. Seriously, if you are ever serious about actually LEARNING to play with the mac on it's own terms, Xcode and darwinports are your friends.
As far as running OS X as a server, I like Tiger Server so much my Xserve G5s running UbuntuPPC.
You'll get OS X off my MacBook when you pry it from my dead hand though. I'm hard core at work, but at home I really can't give a flying hoot what is doing what as l

My retort to that kind of analysis (that my dad was so fond of when growing up) is this:

Kids today don't know how shitty they have it compared to kids in 20-30 years.

Unfair relativistic comparisons go both ways and in the end its all perspective-- I'm pretty hungry right now. In Ethiopia there are entire villages that have eaten less than I've eaten today, surely they're more hungry than me.. But that doesn't make me feel any less hungry.

Basically, a parent was like, any machine nowadays can handle linux.... even machines without much ram... and I was basically saying that any older machine without a gb of ram won't run well. 1 gb is still a good chunk of ram, and so is 512, and 256. (Linux on low amounts of ram runs like a fat slug crawling vertically up a wall)

What a flamebaity subject line...I think you're right though, well... maybe you are. The guy hasn't stated what his objective is.

1) If he has found some amazing command line program that only works in OS X, then he'd probably be best served by simply turning off the GUI and forgetting X11. There are several different ways to do this for each different version of OS X at MacOSXhints.com

2) If he wants to run X11 apps, then Linux is definitely the better way to go, there will be 3d acceleration support for the

C'mon, I know no one reads the article, but your answer is write in the summary: "And, though the open source community has made great strides in reverse engineering proprietary drivers from Mac OS X, I would love to be able to simply keep using the drivers that came with it, for now."

Not using Aqua eliminates OS X's graphics drivers.After that, much of the hardware in a Mac is generic (graphics card, wireless networking, usb/firewire, bluetooth) or usually well implemented (sound, ethernet) in Linux.

I think the wireless is really the sticking point. I have a G4 Powerbook, and I have it set up to dual-boot with OS X and Linux. I've been using the OSS bcm43xx driver for wireless on Linux, and its stability has left something to be desired. Up until my recent upgrade (had to use a release candidate kernel), the machine would hard-lock if I left it for a few hours idle with the wireless radio on. For that reason alone, I could understand a heavy wireless user not wanting to use it. And that's just one

I remember running a full 'nix with X11 and TWM with 4mb of RAM on a Sun 3/80. If you wanted color, a Sun 3/60 could handle it with 8mb; 16mb would give you a "screaming" 4 mips pizza box. When the Sun 3/80s and Sparc 1's came out, a 32mb system with a cg24 sbus card could get you full 24bit color with a megapixel display. And it had plenty of RAM to do real work.

Compare that with a 128mb or 256mb G3 CRT iMac and you've got way more than enough ram and CPU horsepower to run X11 with plenty of useful apps. Christ, I ran X11 on a 486 with 8mb of RAM and a 512kb XVGA card back in 1994 and it worked just fine. (And BTW: NeXTStep on an old cube ran DPS just great in 16mb of RAM too. It's not DPDF that's the hog - it's Aqua).

Compare that with a 128mb or 256mb G3 CRT iMac and you've got way more than enough ram and CPU horsepower to run X11 with plenty of useful apps. Christ, I ran X11 on a 486 with 8mb of RAM and a 512kb XVGA card back in 1994 and it worked just fine. (And BTW: NeXTStep on an old cube ran DPS just great in 16mb of RAM too. It's not DPDF that's the hog - it's Aqua).

Mach is a resource hog. But that's not the fault of Aqua. However, Aqua is also a huge resource hog, without much benefit if you only have 2d video acceleration. Might as well just run X11 in that case. And, if you're going to do that - might as well just run Linux or NetBSD as monolithic kernels tend to run much faster.

What you said is somewhat true. the heavy threading made it feel very fast and responsive. it also would handle media (audio, MIDI, video) very quickly. Certain benchmarks, i'm sure, would show it to be slower. but not all types of opearations, as a rule, would be slower, just because of the microkernel or the multithreading.

Yeah. I keep telling the scientists where I work, "Do your visualization on Macs; there's no better platform. But do your compute on Linux or one of the mono-kernel BSDs." You're absolutely right that heavy real-time threading tends to make a desktop "feel" faster, but that's simply UI responsiveness. If you want to do heavy compute - where context switching incurs a heavy toll on output - then, a monolithic kernel is still the best approach.A good analogy is the difference between bandwidth and latency. Mi

I can confirm that Gentoo runs well on an old 266mhz green G3 new world IMac. The machine had 192MB of ram and I used it to test DR17 (get-e.org) on PPC. The biggest problem was installing the DRM drivers for the ATI Rage chip (Have to pull them from CVS). Aside from that everything seemed to work fine, as long as you disabled kernel pre-empt (this might be fixed in modern kernels).

I was running Gentoo on a similar system - a 350Mhz G3. It worked so well I used it as my email / web / imap / database / file server for 18 months or something. Then the damned thing started having troubles detecting the hard disk when starting up. It would just throw the disk heads around, making a horrible sound, until you stopped it. But take the disk out and put it in other computer, and it was fine - could read all stuff off, etc. I would have to sit at the thing and hit the reset button for hours som

If you ever have the opportunity to run it again, I believe pre-link will solve/mitigate the slow application startup issue. It took FFox startup from 12 seconds down to three, and OO Writer from a half cup of coffee to a couple swigs (though, on a good day, I could still out-type the cursor with spell/grammar check enabled).

you cumshitting mouth-breather. it is pathetic that you take pride in running Nigger Linux on anything, much less a Mac, much less thinking anyone gives a shit.

That's awesome! I can now skip my daily visit to bash.org! I prefer to refer to Gentoo as a "Shit Vortex of incompatibility and misconfiguration", though it is not masicism that drives me run it, but a sense of duty. I find, report, and fix package bugs before they ever see the light of day in your "Whitey" distros. All I can really say is "You're Welcome".

I call bullshit on your bullshit calling bullshit.:)"X11 takes less memory than Aqua if you run it in monochrome mode with a window manager that can barely manage windows. Is that news? I don't think "monochrome X11 with twm" is what he was asking about."

XFCE, which is a perfectly usable X11 desktop which can run in as little as 32MB RAM, though that's a lot like Windows "minimum requirements", you'll need double that for it to work well.

For starters, most X11 setups still need to redraw a window when it's exposed -- even with a fast CPU, it's noticable

Oh please! You're one of those window wankers, aren't you? The ones that sit in OS-X all day with the aptly-named 'mail' app running, wildly wanking it from side to side, and also sometimes from top to bottom, salivating over the speed your wallpaper is being redrawn at. Oh! You can wank SO fast! Look at how fast it wanks!